Best quotes by Alexander Pope

Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.

A long, exact, and serious comedy; In every scene some moral let it teach, And, if it can, at once both please and preach.

There still remains to mortify a wit The many-headed monster of the pit.

Be niggards of advice on no pretense; For the worst avarice is that of sense.

Where grows?--where grows it not? If vain our toil, We ought to blame the culture, not the soil.

Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise. By mountains pil'd on mountains to the skies? Heav'n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.

Who know but He, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms, Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind.

Where beams of imagination play, the memory's soft figures melt away.

Poets heap virtues, painters gems, at will, And show their zeal, and hide their want of skill.

Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe, That seemed but zephyrs to the train beneath.

And soften'd sounds along the waters die: Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play.

Nor in the critic let the man be lost.

The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife, / To help me through this long disease, my life.

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Let opening roses knotted oaks adorn, And liquid amber drop from every thorn.

In every work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend.

To dazzle let the vain design, To raise the thought and touch the heart, be thine!

The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

I have more zeal than wit.

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow; The rest is all but leather and prunello.

Pretty! in amber to observe the forms Of hairs, of straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms! The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there.

Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.

The dances ended, all the fairy train For pinks and daisies search'd the flow'ry plain.

By flatterers besieged And so obliging that he ne'er obliged.

Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield; Learn from the beasts the physic of the field; The arts of building from the bee receive; Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave.

What nature wants, commodious gold bestows; 'Tis thus we cut the bread another sows.

Th' unwilling gratitude of base mankind!

Grave authors say, and witty poets sing, That honest wedlock is a glorious thing.

Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, if man's unhappy, God's unjust.

The light of Heaven restore; Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more.

What riches give us let us then inquire: Meat, fire, and clothes. What more? Meat, clothes, and fire. Is this too little?

Offend her, and she knows not to forgive; Oblige her, and she'll hate you while you live.

If faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn?

A field of glory is a field for all.

While man exclaims, "See all things for my use!" "See man for mine!" replies a pamper'd goose.

Ladies, like variegated tulips, show 'Tis to their changes half their charms we owe.

Talk what you will of taste, my friend, you'll find two of a face as soon as of a mind.

Our grandsire, Adam, ere of Eve possesst, Alone, and e'en in Paradise unblest, With mournful looks the blissful scenes survey'd, And wander'd in the solitary shade. The Maker say, took pity, and bestow'd Woman, the last, the best reserv'd of God.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

What so pure, which envious tongues will spare? Some wicked wits have libell'd all the fair, With matchless impudence they style a wife, The dear-bought curse, and lawful plague of life; A bosom serpent, a domestic evil, A night invasion, and a mid-day devil; Let not the wise these sland'rous words regard, But curse the bones of ev'ry living bard.

Horses (thou say'st) and asses men may try, And ring suspected vessels ere they buy; But wives, a random choice, untried they take; They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake; Then, nor till then, the veil's removed away, And all the woman glares in open day.

Wit and judgment often are at strife.

The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth.

Tis all in vain to keep a constant pother About one vice and fall into another.

For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight; his can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

An honest man's the noblest work of God.

A fly, a grape-stone, or a hair can kill.

A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Trade it may help, society extend, But lures the Pirate, ant corrupts the friend: It raises armies in a nation's aid, But bribes a senate, and the land's betray'd.

Those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.

Music the fiercest grief can charm, And fate's severest rage disarm. Music can soften pain to ease, And make despair and madness please; Our joys below it can improve, And antedate the bliss above.

By music minds an equal temper know, Nor swell too high, nor sink too low. . . . . Warriors she fires with animated sounds. Pours balm into the bleeding lover's wounds.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

Jarring interests of themselves create the according music of a well-mixed state.

Old politicians chew on wisdom past, And totter on in business to the last.

True self-love and social are the same.

Modest plainness sets off sprightly wit, For works may have more with than does 'em good, As bodies perish through excess of blood.

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

Still when the lust of tyrant power succeeds, some Athens perishes, or some Tully bleeds.

That each from other differs, first confess; next that he varies from himself no less.

The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife gives all the strength and color of our life.

Of little use, the man you may suppose, Who says in verse what others say in prose; Yet let me show a poet's of some weight, And (though no soldier) useful to the state, What will a child learn sooner than a song? What better teach a foreigner the tongue? What's long or short, each accent where to place And speak in public with some sort of grace?

O let us still the secret joy partake, To follow virtue even for virtue's sake.

Court-virtues bear, like gems, the highest rate, Born where Heav'n influence scarce can penetrate. In life's low vale, the soil the virtues like, They please as beauties, here as wonders strike.

Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.

Virtue may choose the high or low degree, 'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me; Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king, She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.

Sometimes virtue starves while vice is fed.

I am satisfied to trifle away my time, rather than let it stick by me.

Taste, that eternal wanderer, which flies From head to ears, and now from ears to eyes.

Behold the groves that shine with silver frost, their beauty withered, and their verdure lost!